<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<title>black-winged roses that safely changed by Solanaceae</title>
<style type="text/css">

body { background-color: #ffffff; }
.CI {
text-align:center;
margin-top:0px;
margin-bottom:0px;
padding:0px;
}
.center   {text-align: center;}
.cover    {text-align: center;}
.full     {width: 100%; }
.quarter  {width: 25%; }
.smcap    {font-variant: small-caps;}
.u        {text-decoration: underline;}
.bold     {font-weight: bold;}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/24330790">black-winged roses that safely changed</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Solanaceae/pseuds/Solanaceae'>Solanaceae</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Little Earthquakes - Tori Amos (Song)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Dystopia, F/F, Hopeful Ending</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-05-23</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-05-23</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-18 06:07:45</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,532</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/24330790</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Solanaceae/pseuds/Solanaceae</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p><i>Ryo sings like falling water, low and constant in the dusty shafts of sunlight that lance through the holes in the ruined warehouse roof. She sits cross-legged on the cracked tiles, hands on her knees and eyes closed. Leah watches, unashamed while she can’t be seen.</i> // Dystopian wlw for Jukebox 2020.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Original Female Character/Original Female Character</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>7</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>9</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>Jukebox 2020</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>black-winged roses that safely changed</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><ul class="associations">
      <li>For <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/roguefaerie/gifts">roguefaerie</a>.</li>



    </ul><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>
  <i>And I hate and I hate and I hate and I hate<br/>Disintegration<br/>Watching us wither<br/>Black-winged roses that safely changed their color</i>
</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>— Tori Amos, Little Earthquakes</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Leah has a diary. </p><p>This is forbidden. </p><p>Not because of the surplus laws, or the historical archival priorities that should have claimed this archaic form of record-keeping long ago — no. This diary, with three blue plastic jewels mirror-glinting on the cover and stiff thread on the binding that threatens to come loose if she is too rough with it, is illegal because Leah Ruken, ID no. 174937, is designated a non-creative, non-intellectual under statute 32. The tattooed letters on her wrist betray this. </p><p>Leah is not <em> allowed </em> to draw or write, is barely permitted to imagine and only because they cannot stop that (yet). She is a Breeder. Her life is her body, kept ready for the summons to the Birthing Center, to become a vessel for another life, another future citizen. </p><p>She is sixteen, and so she supposes that they will call for her soon.</p><p>***</p><p>The diary is a gift, passed to her under the table with shaking hands. She knows what it is from the moment she touches it, the weight of its secret defiance unsettling against her palms.</p><p><em> For your songs, </em> Ryo whispers, before Leah can even begin to unwrap the yellowing newspaper clumsily taped around the hard square shape. </p><p>She ought to protest, ought to turn in her best friend for treason — for this act of sedition, because the laws regarding what citizens ought to be are in place to keep society in <em> order </em>. Individualism breeds chaos breeds death. </p><p>(She ought to know about breeding — it’s her life, after all.)</p><p>She whispers her thanks instead, clasping Ryo’s hand tight before peeling back the paper. The diary fits between her hands perfectly, the cover emblazoned with an iris. Only three of the plastic jewels still cling to the flower’s outline, but she runs her fingers over the glue-stained gaps between them and smiles.</p><p>Every song she writes in it, she writes for Ryo.</p><p>***</p><p>Ryo sings like falling water, low and constant in the dusty shafts of sunlight that lance through the holes in the ruined warehouse roof. She sits cross-legged on the cracked tiles, hands on her knees and eyes closed. Leah watches, unashamed while she can’t be seen.</p><p>Ryo’s hair, perfectly straight and cropped jaw-length, falling across her forehead and down her cheek. The curve of her neck and glimpses of her collarbone where the neckline of her shirt dips down. Cybernetic implants glitter under her skin, silver expanding and contracting with every breath she takes. Ryo was born fragile, with a faulty heart and weak lungs, but thin wires run between her veins, stitching her together.</p><p>When Leah drags her gaze back up, Ryo is watching, half-moon eyes dark and amused. Leah feels something in her chest like the spark from a broken wire, even though Ryo is the circuited one.</p><p>“We — we should head back,” she mumbles, nervously straightening her shirt sleeve. “Patrol’s coming in half an hour, and it’s a long walk back up.”</p><p>“Half an hour.” Ryo sounds nearly teasing. “Just think of all we could do in that time.”</p><p>Leah nods and runs her fingers along the pencils they found in an old box, molding in the darkness at the back of the warehouse. <em> HB, 2B, 6B. </em> Gold letters imprinted in the green painted wood, like the letters stamped on the wrists of every citizen. She doesn’t know what these mean, though.</p><p>Hers are easier. Designation: Breeder, second class. Her children will be level three, likely born with defects that will be patched up with wire before they are slotted into the workforce. She will produce more bodies for the supply lines, dooming her offspring with something invisible in her genetic code that makes them fragile as spun glass, sterile as the polished hospital equipment she has been familiar with since she was a child. </p><p>Fragile and sterile as Ryo.</p><p>“Stay still,” she says on a sudden whim, selecting the sharpest of the pencils and reaching into her bag for the diary that she keeps nestled inside the lining. </p><p>In the sunlight, Ryo glitters, wire and amber skin and black hair sharp-edged like Leah’s most vivid dream. She can feel the words bubbling under her fingers, a sharp ache that eases as she spills them across the page, an illustration in verse.</p><p>Touching them, she can almost feel the warmth of Ryo’s hand in hers.</p><p>***</p><p>She’s looked through Ryo’s file before. All information on every citizen is available through the Net, including birth records and family genealogies.  Ryo’s is short, because of her age and the two letters stamped in black ink across the top of every page of her records.</p><p>
  <em> Genetic material: NV </em>
</p><p><em>NV</em>. Not viable. Ryo is not fit for reproduction in a world stained radioactive and curtained in soot. She is designated <em>disposable</em>, though they do not say it in as many words. Her IQ is too low for the intellectual quarters and body too broken for birthing. A level three citizen, workforce capable but genetically unfit. Destined for the factories outside the city limits, where she will wear herself down and down until there is nothing left but wires, and then they will collect even those shining silver scraps and stitch them into some other half-broken body.</p><p>It’s all about resource management.</p><p>Leah traces the letters over and over in her diary, pressing down with her pencil until the sharp lines carve ghost-imprints into the pages beneath. She thinks of her own body, ovaries and uterus the only parts of her that matter. She is a level two citizen, productive and cherished and guaranteed an easy life with a quiet end. Non-intellectual, non-creative. Lacking the intelligence mandated as necessary to enjoy artistic or literary pursuits. Fit for reproduction, but little else.</p><p>She will never have to work a day on the level three production lines.</p><p>If anyone found this diary, she would be executed for overstepping her designation.</p><p>***</p><p>The city is divided into three levels, one for each class of citizen. Leah and Ryo live on opposite sides of the dividing line between the second and third — just a cobblestone street separating them from one another. Fifteen steps — Leah counts them every time she crosses, holding her breath and hoping she’s calculated the pause in the city patrol’s route correctly.</p><p>They lie side-by-side on Ryo’s rooftop, a distant thunder of music echoing from a few streets over, and watch the play of floodlights across the ever-present curtain of smog that hangs overhead. Level one is always a circus of light and noise, shining out over the entire city like a lantern from the high hill it sits on.</p><p>“Do you ever write songs about love?” Ryo asks one night. Her hands rest on her stomach, fingers entwined — she doesn’t like to be touched. Leah wonders if it hurts, if it sends electricity sparking through the wires buried in her skin.</p><p>She swallows. “I don’t believe in — that.”</p><p>“As an entire concept, or just for yourself?” Ryo sounds disinterested, eyes wandering across the clouded sky above that mirrors the orange sodium lights in the streets. Her shoulders are tense in a way that Leah has learned to read, though.</p><p>“Does it matter?”</p><p>Here is something she will never tell her best friend: that she has never felt the stirring of emotion under her ribcage that some people speak of, but she thinks she feels something almost close to that whenever she looks at Ryo.</p><p>***</p><p>She met Ryo for the first time in a dirty alleyway, having followed a faint trail of music to the girl crouched behind a trash receptacle, hands over her ear and lips shaping clear notes like drops of water falling into the sooty air. Leah said nothing, only sat down beside her with her back to the wall and listened.</p><p><em> I’m Leah, </em> she said when the girl finished her song. </p><p><em> Ryo, </em> the girl had mumbled, eyes darting from Leah’s face to the tattoo on her wrist. </p><p><em> Your voice is beautiful </em>, Leah said, smiling her honesty to this strange dark-haired girl, and Ryo had given her a tentative nod in return.</p><p>After that, Leah barely went a day without seeing her. They became each other’s shadows, one or the other crossing the street between patrols and climbing rickety stairs or skirting wide marble columns. </p><p>Leah feels clumsy in Ryo’s cluttered home, worried that every step she takes endangers a teetering pile of odds and ends she would have called trash in her own house, but that Ryo collects as if each scrap of paper or bent wire is precious. (Somehow, Ryo’s attention makes them precious to Leah, too.) For her part, Ryo looks like a caged bird under Leah’s tall ceilings, thin shoulders hunched forward as though she is trying to hide from all the empty space.</p><p>Leah has lived alone with an automated watch-system (specially designed to watch over adolescent Breeders) for years. Ryo has no such thing in her house, and Leah never asks how she had survived after being moved out of the city child-rearing center. </p><p>Did level three even <em> have </em>those? She never wondered before meeting Ryo. But she wants to know everything she can about this silver-skinned girl with eyes like a waning moon and voice like falling water. Because Ryo sings, and Leah swears she can feel everything stop to make room for the notes.</p><p>***</p><p>She comes up with the plan over the course of several weeks, scratching streaks of graphite across the thin paper of her diary and watching Ryo sing in the empty warehouse, arms outstretched against the shadows of the cavernous space. This is the only place she sees Ryo with so much bare skin — perhaps she is afraid of the way her implants glitter so brightly, but she wears thick sweaters even in the heat of summer. Here, though, she is fearless.</p><p>Something true for both of them. Leah would never dare dream what she does anywhere but here.</p><p>The city is wide, but the world outside the city limits stretches even wider under a smoke-veiled sun. Somewhere, whole towns of empty houses lie asleep, abandoned to the elements by people focused on consolidation and designation. Miles and miles of places like this, empty and decaying, vestiges of a former civilization. She could — <em> they </em> could— </p><p>These are dangerous thoughts.</p><p>Ryo’s voice rises again, filling the warehouse as though it is a cathedral, and she the only god in this ruined world. </p><p>Leah closes her eyes, pencil falling still, and smiles.</p><p>***</p><p>She writes until her diary is nearly full, only a handful of pages left blank at the very end. Ryo fills every line — sketches of her face in profile, the dark curtain of her hair, her eyes peeking out between silver wires. Near the end is a centerfold map she drew herself, tracing out the paths her feet have carried her over on secret outings, past the city gates and into the forbidden lands.</p><p>(Forbidden but not technically illegal. The citizens fear the outside world, so making laws to forbid them from leaving would be pointless, and the city is nothing if not efficient.)</p><p>Leah considers the smudges of graphite at the tips of her fingers, then tears out the last page and scribbles a note, heart tripping over the secret weight of her intention.</p><p>
  <em> Meet me in the warehouse at midnight. </em>
</p><p>***</p><p><em> What do you dream about? </em> Leah asks once, lying beside Ryo with their hands so close she is sure she can feel faint heat from the other girl’s skin. </p><p>
  <em> I don’t. </em>
</p><p>
  <em> Not at all? </em>
</p><p>Ryo shifts. <em> I don’t remember my dreams. Maybe my brain is broken, too. </em> She means as a joke, perhaps, but it comes out too brittle.</p><p>Leah wants to reach out and take her hand, but the distance between them, slight as it is, feels unbridgeable.</p><p><em> If I could, though... </em> Ryo trails off, and Leah waits. <em> If I could, it’d be of the ocean. And how endless it is, in the pictures, wider than the sky. </em></p><p>The next song she writes for her is of freedom and salt-soaked air, of flying over infinite waves. Ryo smiles, but there is no happiness behind it. </p><p>It isn't enough.</p><p>***</p><p>She waits in the shadow of the building for almost half an hour, the bag of supplies slung over her shoulder growing heavier and nails digging restlessly into her palms as she wonders where Ryo is. This far out, the city is silent. The occasional passing patrol throws bars of light across buildings for a brief second before rounding the corner and fading into the night. </p><p>Her only warning is a soft footfall, then a gleam of silver cybernetics. The tension in her shoulders eases, just like that.</p><p>“You came,” she breathes, relieved. Ryo comes closer.</p><p>“What are you doing?”</p><p>Leah smiles, though she knows Ryo can barely see her in the darkness. “Taking you away from here. I’ve got — I’ve got a <em> plan </em>.” Her map is in her pocket, based on an old textbook in the warehouse and her own wanderings and a good deal of conjecture. Now, she reaches for it, fingers closing around the paper. “We’ll walk east until we reach the coast, then find an abandoned house to sleep in. See the sun rise over the ocean. Stay there forever, never come back—”</p><p>“Leah—”</p><p>She pushes onwards, voice riding over Ryo’s. “You won’t have to ever worry about going to work in a factory, I won’t have to be a Breeder, we can just be — just be Ryo and Leah. Be together.”</p><p>“Leah.” Ryo’s hands descend on her shoulders, stopping the frantic flow of words. “You don’t have to do this.”</p><p>“I know I don’t.” Leah wrests herself free from Ryo’s grip, too drunk on the excitement rushing through her veins to catch the sudden flinch that runs through Ryo. “But we’ll be together.”</p><p>The moonlight is dim, but Leah can still see Ryo’s small, sad smile, etched out in the starlight glimmer of wire. “Aren’t we already?”</p><p>She can't think of an answer to that, because it's true, isn't it? For years, it's been the two of them — but it can't <em> last </em>. (She doesn't know if it ever could have, but she has to try.)</p><p>In her uncertain pause, Ryo says quietly, “It’s too risky, Leah. You don’t have to throw away your future just to try to save <em> me </em>.”</p><p>“I don’t <em> want </em> that future!” The words burst out unexpectedly, voice hitching with surprise at her own admission, but the truth of it rings through her. Quieter, she adds, “I want to be with you.”</p><p>Ryo’s face is like an open wound in the dark. “Why?”</p><p>Leah leans in and brushes her lips against Ryo’s cheek, tastes metallic chill and the tremble in her body. “You know why,” she whispers.</p><p>There’s a lost expression on Ryo’s face like she doesn’t know what to do with this — Leah doesn’t either. This secret wanting has been expanding in her so long that there’s no room left in her to hold it. All she can do is place it in Ryo’s hands and hope.</p><p>Ryo lets out a shuddering breath and nods. “Then — let’s go.”</p><p>Leah takes her hand, squeezes it once. “Let’s go.”</p>
  </div></div>
</body>
</html>